WASHINGTON - Bipartisan legislation to be unveiled Thursday in the
House of Representatives would offer temporary legal status to millions
of undocumented immigrants but would require them to leave the country
before they could be eligible for permanent residency and U.S. citizenship.

The bill by Reps. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.,
is the first major immigration legislation to be introduced in the
current session of Congress, as lawmakers address the status of more
than 11 million immigrants who are in the country illegally.

A comprehensive Senate immigration bill died in the previous, Republican-controlled
Congress amid intense opposition from Republican members, who rebuffed
President Bush's call for a sweeping overhaul of immigration laws.
With Democrats in control of Congress, Bush again has made immigration
a centerpiece of his domestic agenda and thinks he has a strong chance
to succeed now.

The Gutierrez-Flake proposal includes many of the ingredients of
the failed Senate bill. It would create a guest-worker program that
would enable foreign workers to stay in the country for up to six
years to hold jobs that U.S. workers have bypassed.

Bush has insisted that a guest-worker program be part of any immigration
bill to give U.S. businesses a steady source of foreign workers to
fill what they say is a chronic labor shortage in low-skilled and
unskilled jobs. Under the Gutierrez-Flake bill, qualified foreign
guest workers would get three-year visas that they could renew for
another three years, then they'd be required to return home.

Flake said in an interview Wednesday that illegal immigrants who
were in the country now also could be eligible to work legally here
for up to six years if they paid back taxes and fines, learned English
and passed criminal background checks.

If they wanted to stay in the country to be eligible for a green
card - denoting permanent legal residence - and eventual citizenship,
they'd be required to leave the U.S., most likely for Mexico or Canada,
and register back in the United States through a port of entry.

The so-called "touch-back" provision was also in the Senate
bill, in an attempt to soften objections among conservatives who oppose
blanket legalization of undocumented immigrants. The Senate measure
applied different standards for categories of immigrants based on
their lengths of stay in the country, but that feature isn't in the
Gutierrez-Flake bill.

The bill also would require the Department of Homeland Security to
certify that certain steps have been taken to secure U.S. borders
before the guest worker and legalization programs go into effect.
Those conditions would include a sharp increase in border enforcement
personnel and substantial progress on a multibillion-dollar high-tech
surveillance shield that's under construction on the U.S.-Mexican
border.

Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a research
center that's pressing for an overhaul of the immigration system,
said the provisions were aimed at pulling the legislation to the center
of the political spectrum by attracting Republicans who might otherwise
oppose a comprehensive immigration plan.

"This is a recognition that you can't pass the bill without
at least 20 Republicans in the Senate and 40 Republicans in the House,"
she said.

White House officials have been consulted about the bill, Flake said,
but haven't embraced specific legislation. Conservatives in the Senate
have been meeting with top-ranking Bush administration officials in
discussions that could spawn a White House-sanctioned bill. The meetings
have included Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Commerce
Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and two senators who sponsored an alternative
to the failed Senate bill: Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Jon Kyl,
R-Ariz.

Bush made immigration a major component of his State of the Union
address in January, calling for a "rational middle ground between
a program of mass deportation and a program of automatic amnesty."